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Black and white landscape photography has a long and honorable tradition and, in a sense, it is the purest form of depiction of natural landscapes, where everything is reduced to its basic shape, where the interplay of light and shadow and textures dictate the rules of composition and the viewer’s eye cannot be distracted by attractive colors.

The lineage of black and white landscape photography runs from Ansel Adams, who was maybe the first to elevate it to a true art form, to nowadays’ digital photographers, who exploit the digital darkroom to carefully convert images that are naturally born in color, to monochrome.

Andrew S. Gibson is a writer, publisher, traveller and photographer. He started writing articles about photography while travelling in Bolivia, and has been published in several prestigious photography magazines including EOS magazine, where he worked as a Writer and Technical Editor for two years.

He recently published an ebook, titled The Black and White Landscape, that is all about rediscovering this hallowed art form and about getting the best monochrome images from today’s DSLRs and mirrorless cameras. We interviewed Andrew to ask him about his book and his photography.

For a limited time, Andrew is offering a 20% discount on all the products in his store to TTIM listeners. Head over to store.creative-photographer.com and use the offer code TTIM20 at checkout. The offer is valid until midnight GMT, December 13, 2016.

Travel photography is not a very well defined genre and if meant to encompass every photograph taken while traveling, then millions of travel photos are created every day. How can a serious travel photographer stand out from the crowd and produce work that goes beyond vacation snapshots?

What about choice of subject, composition, light, and gesture? How can we exploit those factors to create truly compelling photos and not just snapshots?

These are some of the questions we asked of our guest for this episode, Brenda Tharp.

Brenda is an award-winning photographer, and educator. Her photographs have been featured in major magazines, and accepted into the journals of NANPA Expressions. She has written several books, and is working on a fourth, and still finds time to present frequent lectures on photography, and lead international photography tours and workshops. Her passion for outdoor and travel photography is infectious, and she openly shares her insights and tips to help others improve their photography skills and vision.

Brenda’s images have been used in a variety of commercial and editorial publications, ads, along with greeting cards and calendars. Her photographs are in the private collections of many across the USA.

This episode of the podcast sees the debut of my good friend Ralph Velasco, who I introduced last week, as a co-host. For our first show together, we interviewed Brian Cruickshank.

Brian is a Los Angeles-based photographer whose work is represented by Getty Images to clients worldwide. Brian also leads annual photography tours in Cambodia through an affiliation with PhotoEnrichment Adventures.

WIth Brian we discussed stock photography, the importance of having local support or a “fixer” when traveling to far out places, going beyond clichés when doing travel photography and other assorted topics.

Alright, my dear listeners, we are at episode 50 of the show, which means I’ve been publishing new episodes every week for almost one full year, never skipping a week.

Let me tell you, this is a lot of work, especially since I do it all on my own, from finding and inviting guests, interviewing them, editing the audio, publishing the episode, sharing on social media, the whole shebang! It takes hours of my time every week, but I’m happy to do it, because you seem to love it and because it is working great to put my name out.

In addition, it has enabled me to network with some great people.

Some of those people I have met personally, some have become long-distance friends and today I want to introduce you to one of them. The reason for this is because, starting today, he is going to co-host the show with me. That not only means being able to share some of the load I mentioned above, but also being able to create new and interesting content and taking the show to new heights.

If you have listened to episode 13, you already know this guy, or maybe you already know him by other means, but in any case, please welcome great travel photographer and all-around nice guy, Mr. Ralph Velasco!

Travel photography instructor, author and international guide, Ralph has organized and led a variety of cultural tours around the world, including to Egypt, Mexico’s Copper Canyon, Bhutan, Nepal, Cambodia, Iceland, Central Europe, Morocco, Vietnam, the Adriatic, Romania, Turkey, Spain, Death Valley, Chicago and San Francisco and others. Additionally, as of this writing he’s organized and led more than a dozen fully-licensed People-to-People programs to Cuba.

Duration 22m 11s.

We want to hear from you! What are you struggling with in your photography? What parts of the world would you like to know more about? Do you have any guests to suggest? Please leave us some feedback in the comments. Thank you!

Some people like to travel with cars, others with airplanes, boats, or trains. Some people like to travel on foot. This is the case of Christian Meermann, who is an avid hiker and who recently walked the length of the West Highlands Way, in Scotland, from Fort William to Glasgow, and took some great photos along the way.

Christian is an enthusiast photographer and teacher with a strong interest in black & white photography. His portfolio spans a wide range of genres like animal portraiture, landscape, macro, architecture and abstract photography. When he is not taking pictures, he teaches history and sociology at a comprehensive school, is father of two boys and also a photography mentor at The Arcanum.

You should listen to the interview, if you want to partake in Christian’s emotions as he visited those incredible landscapes and to learn some valuable tips about hiking long distances with photo equipment.

Duration 35m 53s.

Next week’s episode will be a special one. I am introducing some major changes to this podcast, all for the better, and will talk extensively about them with a very special guest.

I have been friends with this week’s guest, Mathieu Gasquet, since a few years ago, when we used to do a YouTube show about mirrorless cameras together. Back then Mathieu was still living in Italy, but he recently moved to Wales with his wife Heather. I asked him to be my guest on the show specifically to tell us all about photographing that great country, but we also chatted extensively about cameras, which are the focus of the website he manages with Heather.

Mathieu’s adventure into the world of photography began during his childhood. His parents gave him a Yashica fx2000 that he accidentally broke during a holiday in Rome. After completing three years of cinema school in France, photography and video turned into his profession. He later created the website MirrorLessons with his partner Heather and it has gone from strength to strength ever since. He says he hasn’t settled on a favorite genre as of yet, but travelling and photography are definitely the two things that make him feel “free”.

I love the mountains, but for some reason I don’t get to visit them often, even though I live pretty close to the Alps. Maybe it’s because the people I hang out with are not lovers of high altitudes, but I miss them a lot. It was therefore a great pleasure for me to chat with Bethany Llloyd this week and to admire her beautiful photographs of the Alps and especially of the Dolomites.

BethanyLloyd is an outdoor enthusiast who takes her photography with her into the mountains. Winter or summer, feet on the ground or seat in a harness she endeavours to find her view from a new angle.

A few weeks ago I was visiting Photokina, the world’s largest photo and video trade fair, held every year in Cologne, Germany. As I was leaving the exhibition’s floor at the end of my last day there, I happened to pass by Fujifilm’s booth and I noticed there was a talk about to start on the stage. The photographer that was going to present her work was Saraya Cortaville, who I didn’t know previously.

I decided to stay a little bit more to attend the presentation and I am happy that I did, because her work was truly inspiring and her personality captivating. At the end of the talk, I introduced myself and invited Saraya to be my guest on the show and she graciously accepted, so we recorded an interview a few days later and here it is.

Saraya Cortaville is an award winning portrait and social documentary photographer. She has received two fellowships (one of only two women in the UK to have achieved this) one for studio portraiture and most recently social documentary for a project she completed in 2015 whilst living in Africa. She was awarded the Peter Grugeon award for the best fellowship portfolio of 2015, and a gold award in Visual Arts in the professional photography awards 2016. Saraya’s passion for travel and people has pushed her career into a more adventurous phase and she has recently lived and worked abroad for various international NGO’s documenting social issues in countries as far as Tanzania and Nepal. Saraya skilfully manages to draw out her subjects emotions and feelings, in a sensitive and empathetic nature, her portraits are an observation and moment of connection, between two people, rather than photographer, subject. When not abroad Saraya shoots primarily location portraiture specialising in children and documentary weddings.

This episode of the podcast is all about giving. Whether it is giving life to a new human being, giving help to disadvantaged communities in developing countries or giving education to aspiring travel photographers and travel writers, my guest Kate Siobhan Mulligan certainly knows what it means to give.

KateSiobhan Mulligan is a freelance travel photographer and photo-educator from British Columbia, Canada. She is COO of The Giving Lens, taking teams around the world on photo workshops that also partner with local NGO during the trip to document, teach photography, and leave an impact on a community. She also is Lead Photo Faculty for MatadorU.com teaching both fundamentals and advanced Travel Photography courses. When not doing these, she freelances in many other areas, or often turns everything off to explore beautiful BC with her husband and their baby girl.

We started my conversation with Kate talking about what a travel photographer must give up, when she has just given birth to a beautiful baby. We then discussed the work she does with The Giving Lens and with MatadorU. I just love the energy and the hope Kate brings to everything she does and I am sure you will love it too, if you listen to her interview.

Susan Onysko is a travel photographer who has devoted the last decade to the art of capturing evocative stories from some of the most remote and extreme locations of our world — from Bhutan to Death Valley to Romania to Vietnam. Because Susan has an eye for both the unexpected images that evoke a locale’s purest essence and the relatable moments that unite us in our similarities, her well-rounded, professional work has garnered numerous international awards and exhibits.

To Susan, people are the best representatives of a location; and their exotic, rugged, or smiling faces are the first to flash through the memories of her trips. Catching people in unguarded, genuine states requires patience, something of which she has an abundance as a mother of four. In locales with few people, she has reflected seemingly human emotions in wildlife. With the luck of being unaffected by jet lag, flexibility in toting family along for adventures, detailed use of digital editing tools to convey intended mood, and freedom from technical “rules,” Susan has proven she’s always ready for opportunities to create something not seen before.

It was a great pleasure to discuss some of Susan’s most beautiful photographs with her, to understand the thought processes that led her to capture that specific scene, the conditions in which they were taken and the equipment she used. If you want to know what makes a great travel photograph, as opposed to a vacation snapshot, you should definitely listen to this interview.